Lecture 2: A Complex Fate

More than a century ago, when Americans had not yet settled the question of their 'identity' or discovered for themselves an independent role in the world, and when Made in America had not yet become a mark of imperial authority, Henry James wrote of the 'complex fate' of those who are children both of the old world and the new. What this complex fate entails he suggested is the need to resist what he called the "superstitious valuation of Europe".

Transcript

What James was concerned with was how, in the face of all that Europe represents in terms of achievement and influence, we are to find a proper value for what belongs to the new world…a value neither brashly above nor cringingly below its real one. It is a matter of giving full weight to what is local, also to what is recent, since part of what is 'superstitious' in our valuation of Europe has to do with the reverential awe we may feel in the presence of mere age. We speak of these places we belong to as new worlds, but what they really are is the old world translated: translated with all that word implies of re-interpretation and change, not simply transported. Our ways of thinking and feeling and doing were developed and tested over many centuries before we brought them to this new place, and gave them a different turn of meaning, different associations, a different shape and weight and colour, on new ground.

But our attitude to 'Europe' is only one part of our complex relationship, here in Australia, with an earlier world and with the intimidating weight of the past. There is also, for us, the example, like a shadow history to be reflected or avoided, of the United States.

Australia and the United States are variations on the same original, though very different in tone and constitution. This means that we share with America qualities that will always lead us to make comparisons, forms of social and political thinking that are peculiar enough to keep us close, however we may deviate in practice, and rare enough to be worth noting.

Australia and the United States derive their legal systems from English common law. That is a system based on precedent rather than a previously established principle as in Continental Europe. Each case as it comes up is referred back to a previous one and a judgement is arrived at by comparing the two rather than by relating the new case back to an abstract principle. This preference for the particular over the general expresses itself in more than just the workings of the law. It has kept ways of thinking in both our societies close to example and fact, made it pragmatic and wary of abstractions. If this is truer in our intellectual life than in the American it is because we missed the influence of Continental Europe that came early to the United States with successive waves of migration; and especially the one that came with the exodus of so many European intellectuals to America between the two wars. It was an influence we did not feel until the middle 1950s.

Our shared heritage has made the example of the States an unusually close one. We always have it in mind. When it came to Federation, the American model was clearly one of the possibilities we might have followed and for our Upper House we did take some elements from it. In recent arguments about the republic the American model of a popularly elected president has seemed to many Australians the one we should in our own way reproduce.

This use of American experience as a reference point for our own goes back to the very beginning. It was, for example, the British experience of convict transportation to Virginia that determined the new and very different way that convicts were dealt with in New South Wales. The British Government also took great care not to reproduce in its relations with these new Australian colonies the mistakes that had lost them the colonies in America. This meant the establishment of freer conditions here, both for convicts and colonists, and this has made a difference.

So did the decision, again a lesson learned from America, to use convict labour to establish the colony rather than the labour of slaves. We were saved something in that. A convict, once he has served his time, is free; his children are born free. The convict stain has remained hard to forget and the brutalities, for some, even harder to forgive, but it has not been carried down from generation to generation like the stain of slavery.

The American precedent was one which was in some ways there to be avoided. But in other ways it provoked expectations, a good many of which proved delusory.

The long and heart-breaking search in the last century for an inland river system that would water the interior and provide a cheap means for the transportation of goods was based on the American example. Also based on the analogy of America's extraordinary expansion in the 19th century, was the idea of an Australia Unlimited; this was an expectation that by the end of the twentieth century Australia would rival and maybe even surpass the United States both in population and in power. The hope died hard. We had always seen ourselves as children of infinite oportunity. Any suggestion to the contrary we took as a personal insult rather than an assertion of hard fact.When the Professor of Geography at Sydney University, Griffith Taylor, dared to make the abominable suggestion in 1911 that by the year 2000 Australia might have a population of no more than 20 million, he was greeted by howls of patriotic rage and driven out of the country.

Almost from the start, our relationship with America and Americans was a special one, a kind of fraternal twinship. Our earliest contact was through the shared industries of whaling and sealing. Later, during the two decades of the gold rushes there was the movement back and forth between here and California of an army of hungry gold-seekers. This meant not only an extraordinary exchange and mixing of populations. It also introduced American habits of speech and folk-songs and popular mythology into a place which until then was a predominantly English and Irish one. A good many of our folk and work songs come to us in their American version rather than in the original Irish or Scots. All this is part of a continuous cultural relationship, especially with the West Coast, that, out of loyalty perhaps to our British origins, we have allowed to be forgotten or suppressed.

San Francisco and Sydney in the nineteenth century were already twin cities. The Lyster Opera Company, for example, which for more than two decades after 1861 provided Sydney and Melbourne with regular opera seasons, had its home base in San Francisco. Australian vaudeville, which was still very much alive here until the late 1950s, was closer in style to American vaudeville than to English Music Hall. As early as 1828, Peter Cunningham, the convict-ships' surgeon, whose reminiscences provide one of the best accounts of life in the early colony, writes of the many foreigners who had taken up residence in Sydney. He mentions French and Germans and Italians, and then stops himself:

"I had almost said Americans," he tells us, "but kindred ties prevent my ever proclaiming them as such." The kindred tie persisted. When, not long after Federation, the new Australian Government invited the American Fleet to visit, the British had to be assured that this was not an attempt on our part to form our own Pacific ties, although it clearly was.

There is a sense in which the Australian East coast and the West coast of America can be seen as opposite banks of a shared body of water. The reflection back and forth is a strong one, it always has been, especially if we look at the demographic make-up of the two places and at the style of life. There is the strong presence of Asians, for example, in both populations. Then these days there is the surf culture, the gay culture and food. What we call Modern Australian cusine is very like what the Americans call Californian.

Once again the idea of ocean has been essential to how we define where we are and who it is we are most closely related to. In that shrinking of distance that is a characteristic of our contemporary world, even the Pacific, largest of oceans has become a lake.

All this complicates any argument about the 'superstitious valuation' of Europe, or of our colonial link to Britain.

Our fate has been more complex than the American one, as Henry James defined it, and was so from the start. The tension for us is not simply between the old world and the new, or even, as I have been suggesting, between new and newer. Unlike the Americans, we found ourselves in an opposite hemisphere to Europe. There were different seasons, unfamiliar vegetation and birds and flowers. There were different and disorienting stars overhead. This has meant a greater tension, for us, between environment or place on the one hand, and on the other, all the complex associations of an inherited culture. We have our sensory life in one world, whose light and weather and topography shapes all that belongs to our physical being, while the larger part of what comes to us through language for example, and knowledge, and training, derives from another.

This is indeed complex, though complexity is not an intolerable burden to minds as flexible as ours, or oughtn't to be. We are amazing creatures, we humans. Our minds can do all sorts of tricks. And this form of complexity, the paradoxical condition of having our lives simultaneously in two places, two hemispheres, may be just the thing that is most original and most Australian about us. I mean, our uniqueness might lie just here, in the tension between environment and culture rather than in what we can salvage by insisting either on the one or the other.

One of the 'superstitious valuations' I wanted to point to in Henry James' definition of 'complex fate' was that of age as opposed to newness; a valuation, as we have experienced it here, that has sometimes made our 210 years seem too small a purchase on time to constitute a genuine history. This is especially obvious when we set it against the forty-thousand years of Australian history that lies behind the indigenous Australians among us.

But 210 years is not a short time. Not if we think of it in terms of lives lived and of all the events and activities and passionate involvements that went into those lives: the things bought and sold, the ideas developed and given a new form, the work, the talk, all that is part of a single life in any single day and which, if we were to grasp the whole of it, we would have to multiply a million times over. Sometimes the only way we can get a sense of those lives and all who lived them, is through the objects, often quite simple objects, that they made and handled. A set of tools, a few shards of pottery, a fragment of wall-painting: it may be no more than that, as we know from the way such survivals bring alive for us the long centuries of Aboriginal presence in our land.

The truth is that history, as we commonly conceive of it, is not what happened, but what gets saved, recorded and told. Most of what happens escapes the telling because it is too common, too repetitious to be worth recording. Even in places like this one where records are kept, the history that is in objects may need to be excavated and made visible before we can experience the richness it represents.

When I was growing up 50 years ago, what I now think of as the iconography of Australia, the visual record of all that has been done and made here, had not yet been gathered and made visible. There were as yet none of the coffee table books or scholarly monographs we now take for granted, on Australian houses and artefacts, on Australian images of the past. No maritime museums. No heritage committees. No National Trust. Compared with Europe the local world we had come out of seemed empty and thin. Now, largely through the work of scholars and museum curators and editors, we can see that our world was not empty at all. It had always been crowded with a busy making and doing. It was as dense and productive as any other offshoot of an advanced civilisation.

The evidence now is all about us: in town and country houses and grand public buildings; in country pubs and court houses and fire stations and old stone bridges; in barns, shearing sheds, and bark huts; in the working landscape of ports. In all those necessary objects that make up our sort of living: bookcases and chaise longues and silver trophies and cast-iron railings and shoe buckles and biscuit tins. These things speak to us. They also speak for us, and for the many lives that lie behind us and lead up to us.

And 200 years is not so short a time in the life of a city, if we set Sydney and Melbourne, for example, beside Washington or Chicago or Leeds - or, to choose European cities that had their growth in the same period, Budapest and Berlin. I shall want to say something in my next lecture about the making of our cities. Cities too are artefacts, the work of many lives and hands.

The business of making accessible the richness of the world we are in, of making dense and substantial our ordinary, day-to-day living in a place, is the real work of culture. It is a matter, for the most part, of enriching our consciousness. This means first of all the increasing of our awareness of what exists around us, so that it registers on our senses in the most vivid way. Then of taking all that sensory experience into our consciousness and giving it a second life there so that we possess the world we inhabit imaginatively as well as in fact. This has been especially important in the case of the land itself. And by land I mean everything that belongs to the land: its many forms of landscape, its unique birds, animals, trees, shrubs, flowers; most of all, the spirit of the land as it exists in all these things, and can be touched and felt there. Painting is one way of possessing the land imaginatively. (We have a rich tradition of landscape painting here.) Another more common way is through photography.

But it is in and through the written word, and especially poetry, that the process works best. Perhaps this is because reading is itself an interiorising activity, a matter of 'taking things in'; perhaps because language, with its combination of image and rhythm, its appeal to the eye and to the way our bodies move is the art in which thought and feeling most intimately connect.

But the process is not always a simple one. Subtle adjustments may have to be made in the way we look at things before we can bring them within the range of our feelings and then, through words, give them a new life as consciousness.

One of the most eloquent of our early writers is the explorer John Oxley. His 'Journals Of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales, 1817-18' are the work of a man with real literary sensibility and an exuberant, if sometimes thwarted, tendency to the romantic. Each day, like a dutiful schoolboy, he writes up in his journal the country he has crossed. So long as what he is encountering is desolate plains, 'deserts' he calls them, he struggles to find words for their undifferentiated dullness and for his own disappointment in them both as explorer and writer. It is heavy going. Then his party gets into rugged mountain country and comes across a waterfall. They see a river that "entered the glen," he writes, "in a fall of vast height . . . a kangaroo was chased to the fall, down which it leapt and was dashed to pieces like the hero (the gallant stag) of Wordsworth's 'Hart-Leap Well." This is on the 14th of September, 1818.

Next day, Oxley's whole literary apparatus swings into action at last, and it is the appearance in the landscape of that literary ghost, the enabling image of Wordsworth's hart, as much as the country itself, that brings the landscape he has encountered into the realm of what he can now express.

"Quitting this place," he writes, "we proceeded up the glen, into which many small streams fell from the most awful heights, forming so many beautiful cascades. After travelling five or six miles we arrived at that part of the river at which, just after passing through a beautiful and level though elevated country, it is first received into the glen. We had seen fine and magnificent falls, each one of which excelled our admiration in no small degree, but the present one so surpassed anything we had previously conceived possible, that we were lost in admiration at the sight of this wonderful natural sublimity." And there it is at last, the Australian sublime. No sense here of that limiting of local possibility in which the earliest of our poets, Baron Field, finds that the only rhyme our language offers for Australia is 'failure'.

What Oxley reveals is as good an example as we might find of the way a landscape that at first seems unfamiliar and estranging, to lie outside any possibility of response, can be brought into the world of feeling. Through the power of words the land comes to exist as a thing felt on the pulse, imprinted on the inward eye, and therefore fully seen at last, fully experienced and possessed.

Writing in the early 1960s, Judith Wright, who is our best reader of poetry as well as one of our finest poets, makes a surprising observation. She points out that "except for the wattle . . . there is very little mention of trees, flowers and birds by name or by recognisable description in Australian verse during the nineteenth and early twentieth century." This is not because they were not there in the landscape, to be seen and appreciated, but because there was as yet no place for them in the world of verse. The associations had not yet been found that would allow them entry there. Currawong and banksia carried no charge of emotion like 'nightingale' or 'rose'. They played no part in the unfolding human saga. As we saw in the case of Oxley. we may need to bring something to natural phenomena before they can reveal themselves to us. As Coleridge puts it, speaking of Nature herself: "Lady, we receive but what we give."

Judith Wright finds the same lack of local reference in the poetry of Christopher Brennan. The flowers he uses in his poetry and which have such a strong symbolic life there are roses and lilies. These are the flowers of Swinburne and Tennyson, not, she writes, "the familiar and unsung flowers of his new country - flowers which had as yet no ritual or symbolic significance and no meaningful associations in literature, even in the minds of his Australian countrymen."

In fact, by the time Judith Wright was writing this in 1965, it was no longer true. But only because the poets of her generation - she herself pre-eminently, but also Douglas Stewart, David Campbell and Roland Robinson, and, when it comes to sea-creatures, John Blight - had created a body of poetry in which all the common phenomena of our Australian world - flowers and trees and birds, and helmet shells and ghost-crabs and bluebottles - had been translated out of their first nature into the secondary and symbolic one of consciousness. This is that great process of culture, and also of acculturation, that creates a continuity at last between the life without and the life within. It is one of the ways - a necessary one - by which we come at last into full possession of a place.

Not legally, and not just physically, but as Aboriginal people, for example, have always possessed the world we live in here: in the imagination. And I must just add that I am not suggesting this as yet another and deeper move in the long process of appropriating the continent and displacing its original owners, but as a move towards what is, in effect, a convergence of indigenous and non-indigenous understanding, a collective spiritual consciousness that will be the true form of reconciliation. That convergence will take place in the imagination, and imagination is essential to it, as Judith Wright saw more than 30 years ago. And poetry is one of the first places where we can expect to see it in the making.

Earlier Australian poetry, even the best of Henry Kendall, had scarcely attempted this, and the Bulletin writers of the 1890s, to quote Judith Wright again, had turned poetry here away from the possibilities of philosophy and interpretiveness towards "simplicity, vigour and colloquialism", or towards "sociable yarning", as another critic puts it, "with a group of mates". This was a poetry of the outward life, of the soul in action, of Paterson's 'Clancy of the Overflow' and 'The Man From Snowy River'. It took another 40 years, and a poet of great originality (and considering what had gone before, of extraordinary daring) to write a poem that claimed for poetry the right to be inward, to be difficult, even obscure, so that the poem might speak for itself at last and get into words what has not yet come into consciousness, what is still "feeling its way to air". The poet was Kenneth Slessor, the poem * 'South Country'.

After the whey-faced anonymity Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush,After the rubbing and the hit of brush,You come to the South Country As if the argument of trees were done,The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains,All ended by these clear and gliding planes,Like an abrupt solution.

And over the flat earth of empty farms The monstrous continent of air floats back Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black Bruised flesh of thunderstorms:Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge,Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light,So huge, from such infinities of height,You walk on the sky's beach.

While even the dwindled hills are small and bare,As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful,Something below pushed up a knob of skull,Feeling its way to air.

Landscape in this poem finally gets inside. It would be difficult to say whether what is being presented here is the image of a real landscape, precisely described, objectively there, or an interior landscape just breaking surface, just coming into existence, into apprehension, of which the external one is a reflection. The poem in fact makes no distinction between the two, and part of its beauty and the pleasure it gives us is that it allows us to enter this state, too, in which all tension between inner and outer, environment and being, is miraculously resolved.

'South Country' is an important moment in the development of consciousness in Australia. It is a poem that grants permission to us all to be men and women for whom the inner life is real and matters. And it has a special significance for writers: there is a sense in which the whole of modern Australian writing is 'feeling its way to air' in this poem , and not just poetry either, but fiction as well, in the same way that a whole line of Russian writers, as Turgenev tells us, came out from under Gogol's overcoat. But what I want to point to, on this occasion, is the way the poem resolves the tension between inner life, mind, and the world of objects; between consciousness and environment.

It is in moments of high imagination and daring experiment like the writing of 'South Country' that what Henry James called our 'complex fate' is most clearly visible, - as a tension that has been embraced, as a complexity that has been put to use, a condition embodied and made available to all of us as an agency for grounding ourselves both in a particular world and in our own skin.